Sita

The Sita Collection is a superfamily rooted in 19th-century Scottish typographic history that offers a contemporary interpretation of the past to suit modern needs for digital and print typesetting. The collection comprises two styles across four weights, with corresponding italics.

Sita Sans and Sita Serif are designed for optimal form and weight harmony when composed side by side. Sharing the same skeleton, the two families complement each other while retaining the distinctive characteristics of the transitional and grotesque genres of the 19th century.

Mastered by
Tiny Type Co.→

Sita Serif Regular
Sita Serif Medium
Sita Serif Bold
Sita Serif Black

Sita Serif Italic
Sita Serif Medium Italic
Sita Serif Bold Italic
Sita Serif Black Italic

Sita Sans Regular
Sita Sans Medium
Sita Sans Bold
Sita Sans Black

Sita Sans Italic
Sita Sans Medium Italic
Sita Sans Bold Italic
Sita Sans Black Italic

Sita Sans Regular

16px

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts. His literary contributions established the modern fantasy genre, while he campaigned for socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.

Sita Sans Medium

16px

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, ARA (28 August 1833 – 17 June 1898) was an English painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. Burne-Jones worked as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. His early paintings show the influence of Rossetti, but by 1870 he had developed his own style.

Sita Sans Bold

16px

Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.

Sita Sans Black

16px

Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM (10 April 1894 – 6 February 1982) was an English painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in England. In London, Nicholson met the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (to whom he was married from 1938 to 1951) and Henry Moore.

Sita Sans Italic

16px

Paul Nash (11 May 1889 – 11 July 1946) was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English artistic works.

Sita Sans Medium Italic

16px

Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world. Moore also produced drawings, including Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.

Sita Sans Bold Italic

16px

Frances MacDonald MacNair (24 August 1873 – 12 December 1921) was a Scottish artist whose design work was a prominent feature of the Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style) during the 1890s. Frances MacDonald MacNair was the sister of Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, another renowned artist and designer.

Sita Sans Black Italic

16px

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (5 November 1864 – 7 January 1933) was a British artist who worked in Scotland, and whose design work became one of the defining features of the Glasgow Style during the 1890s to 1900s. She began collaborating with her sister Frances, and in 1896 the pair produced book illustrations, embroidery, and more.

Sita Serif Regular

16px

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (7 June 1868 – 10 December 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdonald, was influential on European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Secessionism.

Sita Serif Medium

16px

James Herbert McNair (23 December 1868 – 22 April 1955), was a Scottish artist, designer and teacher whose work contributed to the development of the Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style) during the 1890s. As part of his training, he attended evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art between 1888 and 1894.

Sita Serif Bold

16px

Art Nouveau, Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. Other characteristics of Art Nouveau were a sense of dynamism and movement.

Sita Serif Black

16px

Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a growing “alienation” from prevailing “morality”.

Sita Serif Italic

16px

One major objective of Art Nouveau was to break down the traditional distinction between fine arts (especially painting and sculpture) and applied arts. It was most widely used in interior design, graphic arts, furniture, glass art, textiles, ceramics, jewellery and metal work.

Sita Serif Medium Italic

16px

The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression.

Sita Serif Bold Italic

16px

The first Art Nouveau houses and interior decoration appeared in Brussels in the 1890s, in the architecture and interior design of houses designed by Paul Hankar, Henry van de Velde, and especially Victor Horta, whose Hôtel Tassel was completed in 1893.

Sita Serif Black Italic

16px

Modernism took a critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism. The movement also rejected the concept of absolute originality — the idea of “Creatio ex nihilo” creation out of nothing — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism.

Research & Process
The Sita Collection

Written by

Edouard Berard→

Origins

As a focus for my diploma project during my Masters in Type Design at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, my long-standing interest in British and Scottish type history led me to exploring prominent U.K. typographers of the 18th and 19th century. Through early research into 18th century Scottish typefounder Alexander Wilson’s work with the Wilson Foundry, I discovered William Miller. The latter Scottish typographer’s work was further developed through his own practice at the Miller Foundry (1809), later named the Miller & Richard Foundry (1838). The transitional faces developed at the Miller & Richard Foundry became a primary reference for the project.

Concept

Sita was inspired by the idea of a type family that could seamlessly unite two contrasting styles, while harmoniously sharing a common skeleton. For this family, I began by exploring the Scotch Roman construction as a foundation.

Sita was designed with careful attention to weight, x-height, spacing, and contrast to ensure that the serif and sans versions complement each other effortlessly. Unlike typical superfamilies that blur distinctions, Sita treats both styles as equal yet interconnected.

Serif and Sans

Sita Serif is a contemporary interpretation of Miller & Richard’s Double Pica Roman No. 2 (1822), a Scotch Roman typeface that encapsulates both calligraphic fluidity and precision in form. The serif style remains faithful to its source while introducing subtle refinements for contemporary readability. One example includes preserving calligraphic warmth in select forms like the ‘a’ and ‘n,’ inspired by Alexander Wilson’s Pica Roman (1783). Sita Serif aims to strike the balance between display elegance through its high contrast model and text efficiency through the height relationship of its x-height, ascenders, and descenders.

Sita Sans uses Sita Serif’s construction as a foundation for the alphabet’s proportions and metrics. While the skeleton for Sita Sans is derived from its serif counterpart, characteristics of the sans take inspiration from early British grotesques by way of the tapered terminals found in Stephenson & Blake’s Grotesque No. 88 (1919), and the lettershapes of Miller & Richard’s Sans Serif No. 4 (1912). This approach creates unity between both styles of the collection, while retaining the flare and charm found in tapered details of the grotesques.

Development Process

Developing the typeface was probably the most difficult stage, as a number of parameters had yet to be determined. This required a lot of time studying sources, various models, and approaches to the letter’s drawings. The italics are a reflection of Sita’s hybrid heritage. The serif italics retain their calligraphic structure, and gestural nature on the page, therefore staying true to their Scotch Roman roots. Inversely, the sans follow the early grotesque model, slanted instead of true italics.

As development on the typeface continued, the two styles began to influence each other further. A key glyph demonstrating the styles’ departure from their respective inspirations is the letter ‘t’. The letter ‘t’ of the serif italics deviates from the original source material. Instead, it follows the sans counterpart with a more mechanical approach. This allowed the ‘t’ to flow better in longform typesetting.

One of the collection's goals was to be able to set the styles inline within a paragraph without the text feeling interrupted. In addition to the model choices detailed above, more technical decisions had to be considered surrounding the contrast, x-height, width, and italic angles to achieve a fluid reading between both styles in a single paragraph. The x-height of the serif is lower than that of the sans. The italic angle of the sans is less extreme than that of the serif. The sans’ counters are more open and width slightly wider overall compared to the serif, in an attempt to balance the color between both styles.

Sita reinterprets the relationship between the serif and sans, moving beyond the traditional view of these styles as separate entities and instead presenting them as complementary elements of a unified system. Rooted in the rich typographic heritage of Scotland and Britain, it refines multiple influences for contemporary designers.

Originally intended for digital and print editorial use, Sita balances structure and warmth to create a collection that can handle a variety of tonal and technical typesetting requirements. The versatility of the collection meets today's demands for typefaces to perform at text and display sizes, resulting in a typeface family that can satisfy designers' appetites beyond editorial work.

This project was developed at ECAL as my diploma project, first taking shape in September 2022. I had the privilege of receiving guidance from Alice Savoie and Kai Bernau, with additional input from Matthieu Cortat-Roller and Radim Peško.

A big thank you also goes to my dearest friends, colleagues and ECAL peers, especially Coline Besson, JuanJun Feng, Niklas Herrmann, Minjong Kim, Théo Pontoizeau, Rongyi Tang and also Hugo Blanzat for their invaluable feedback and encouragement.

Edouard Berard
2025